Why MELEE feels ESPECIALLY BAD to play (targeting, hitboxes, pushing)

1. Autotargeting - It feels impossible to target specific parts of a boss with a melee strike and some abilities such as Rake/Ice Strike teleport you to a random part of the boss and do some weird pathfinding that just feels like you lose control of your character, almost as if the bosses are covered in lubricant and you just slip along their hitbox.

2. Hitboxes - Monsters with big hitboxes (Colossus, Ekbab, Tor Gul) feel particularly bad on melee because when you are targeting them you get moved to different parts of their body and it is hard to control your character and make it stay in an exact position relative to the monster.
You can also get stuck in their body parts or desync when dodge rolling very close to them.

3. Pushiness - The monsters pushing generally feels like I am rubber banding, not like an intentional animation/interaction

Yeah the way this game handles collision is fucking dogshit.

Figure this shit out, I'm tired of getting stuck on some little pebble that I cannot even see for fucks sake.

the targeting is even odd on ranged skills (the vector starts at your feet, not your weapon)

in regards to melee, the spear feels much much better than maces just because of the speed. but it still feels clunky especially due to ending animation, which incentivize you to cancel it with dodge roll, which is risky in itself.

only played through campaign with melee staff, but it felt... better? that is if monk could take a hit, which he can't so you end up converting those melee skills to ranged, which is why i stopped mapping with it

hopefully it's addressed in 0.3, gameplay feel should pe a priority

you are spot on sir and we can add Rathbreaker, Mektul & The Queen of Filth to the feels-bad-as-melee-list.

to any dev reading this and disagreeing: please test again! this time kill the boss from 100% with auto attack only. it will become painfully obvious that these bosses need some tweaks.

+1

Agreed. I also don't believe bosses should be able to shove you around when they do attacks Draven is a big offender of this imo.

Yeah losing control of your character is the worst feeling

sadly this will never be fixed. its the most obvious problem since 0.1 but poe1 doesn't care and ggg isn't good enough as a dev.

Everyone knows melee is hard mode vs ranged. The difference is staggering in terms of easiness. However I only play warrior because I’m a masochist and I like a good challenge. After playing melee you’ll be so good mechanically that when playing range you won’t even need great gear. Thus has been my experience, playing warrior on ssf made me mechanically so good that I dodge roll
Perfectly all of the time